Android: Instead of keeping a half-dozen apps on your phone to manage all of the free cloud storage you’ve signed up for, CloudCube is a single app that gives you complete control over all of them. The app supports two-way upload and download, automatic syncing, and more.

Fear not, there is a comparable replacement to Google Reader out there

It’s time to face the facts here, folks: Google Reader is shutting down on July 1. Many of us (myself included) have been in the “denial” phase assuming that Google would come up with a replacement for the service, but it’s time to start thinking about alternatives. Of the handful of potential replacements, Feedly seems to be in the lead right now and offers a nearly painless transition over from Google Reader.

Let’s break down the process of moving your beloved RSS feeds over from Google Reader to Feedly, and give a few tips and tricks along the way to make the process as smooth as possible.

That’s the case with the new Canon PowerShot N, which blends some features of a smartphone with a digital camera, and breathes some new life into almost-forgotten point-and-shoots.

For starters, this digital camera is square — not oblong, like most point-and-shoots.

It also has a unique shutter and zoom function, and a simple, one-touch video-recording option. It connects to Wi-Fi quickly and easily.

[ See post to watch video ]

Last, but not least, the PS N has an extendable, touch-friendly viewscreen that can be adjusted to a 90-degree angle. This is so you can shoot images low to the ground, or do what I did: Prop it up like a mini-tent on the table while you view your photos.

So this $299 12-megapixel Canon stands out. But is that enough to make it worth the dough, when smartphone cameras are getting better and better?

I’ve been using the Canon PS N for the past week, and it’s a mixed bag. Overall, I like it. It ditches superfluous buttons and features. And its design is — dare I say it — cute.

The majority of the hundred images I captured with the 12-megapixel PowerShot N were crisp, and there are a few fun features to play with. But in terms of sensor size and maximum aperture, it still isn’t as powerful as its PowerShot siblings — like the PowerShot S100 or S110 — or some of its competitors from other camera makers. Some photos lacked a professional-looking depth of field, and pictures captured in low light weren’t great.

It’s probably best suited for a consumer who likes some flair in product design, and wants a handful of easy-access, creative features, but isn’t looking for an overly complicated camera.

The Canon PS N measures 2.4 by 3.1. by 1.2 inches — so, not technically square, but close — and weighs 6.9 ounces. It fits nicely in the palm. It also fits well in most pockets and purses. At a recent wedding, I asked my date to tuck it in his suit, and he said he forgot he was carrying it.

The camera is available in matte black and shiny white. I tested the latter.

The entire backside of the camera is a 2.8-inch diagonal LCD touchscreen. There are no buttons on the back, which is part of the reason why the camera is so compact.

I liked this. I found I didn’t miss having buttons on the back. The power button is on the left side of the camera; on the right side, there are dedicated Wi-Fi, playback and creative mode buttons. Otherwise, I accessed all functions through the touchscreen.

The PS N works with microSD memory cards, and claims a 200-shot battery life.

Its 8x zoom lens occupies almost the entire face of the camera, like some sort of cartoon character with an extra-large mouth. The camera doesn’t have a shutter button or zoom dial. You control the zoom using the rings around the lens, which will feel comfortable for experienced photographers.

More interestingly, you snap pictures by gently pressing the ring around the lens. (If you’re not aware of this, you’ll at first spend some time staring at the camera, wondering where the heck the shutter button is.)

The camera also has a touchscreen shutter option. Some photographers may scoff at touchscreen capturing, but to me it felt familiar — like shooting pictures on a smartphone — and I preferred that over pressing the lens ring.

That’s not to say either option was perfect. With the touchscreen, I sometimes snapped a photo when I only meant to tap the function or menu button. And left-handed people might find that if they use the lens ring to capture photos, they’ll block the flash. So the camera takes some getting used to.

Full HD video is also captured by tapping a red record button on the right-hand side of the touchscreen, as you would with a smartphone.

The PowerShot N has a 12.1-megapixel sensor, but the sensor is a little smaller than the one in the PowerShot S100 and S110, which lessens the camera’s ability to capture good digital images in low light. Other camera makers are also starting to add larger sensors to compacts, to increase the appeal of digi-cams in a smartphone era.

Pictures taken at night in my dim apartment were yellowish and a little noisy. Pictures taken in daylight or in well-lit settings, however, were good.

A picture of the Empire State Building taken with the Canon PowerShot N, which has an 8x zoom lens.

But the camera also has some limitations when it comes to range. I maxed out the zoom when taking pictures of the Empire State Building from a New York City rooftop several blocks away, and the pictures didn’t blow me away.

“Smart” modes and Instagram-y filters are becoming standard in high-end point-and-shoots. So to differentiate, Canon has added a physical button on the right-hand side of the camera body that enables a “creative shot” mode. This captures a total of six images in one shot — the original image, plus five that have been altered with fun filters.

So, when I snapped a picture of a pizza (yes, just what we need — more “what I ate for lunch” pictures), one image was a close-up of a slice, another included the whole pie, another added a glow to the picture, and so on.

The “creative shot” mode on the Canon PS N creates a handful of filtered photos in one shot, like this image of the Brooklyn Bridge.

These filters are preset and can’t be adjusted, but, again, this dedicated button makes it super-simple for even novice photographers to apply effects.

Like many newer consumer cameras, the PS N is equipped with Wi-Fi. You have to first connect the camera to a Wi-Fi network, and then to an iPhone or Android device running the free Canon CameraWindow app on the same Wi-Fi network.

In the past, I’ve experienced glitches connecting Canon cameras to the app, but I didn’t have any problems with the PS N. Canon says it has improved Wi-Fi capabilities in its newer cameras.

I was able to send photos from the PS N to my iPhone within seconds, and then share the photos to Instagram and Facebook. (Here I was able to compare photos of a group shot taken at the wedding — mine taken with the PS N, and a friend’s shot from her smartphone. I definitely noticed a difference in quality.)

The Canon PowerShot N won’t have huge appeal for pros or camera enthusiasts. But, for average photo-takers looking for something small and eye-catching to carry next to their smartphones, the Canon PowerShot N makes a good play for your pocket.

Above, footage of a protester’s quadcopter in Gezi Park getting shot down by the Turkish Police. Below, the footage of police violence the drone had been capturing (complete with music that sounds like it came out of an orc-fighting scene in the Hobbit). Ahead of us: a long, weird future history of protest.

Tuesday afternoon on June 11th 2013, Police was violently attacking peaceful protestors. Police fired guns at one of our RC drone during the protests in Taksim square, Istanbul. Police aimed directly at the camera. Due to the impact on the camera (it did have a housing) the last video was not saved properly on the SD card. The camera and drone were both broken. Managed to keep the SD card. Here is the footage from that camera! This footage you are about to see is from the prior flights minutes before the incident.

Puns bring a sprinkle of eye-rolling hilarity to everyday life. Sure, they don’t exactly qualify as high-brow humor, but any joke that’s good enough for old dad should make you at least chuckle a little.

There’s a certain irony to the Impossible Instant Lab taking a long time to develop, but we won’t mind (much) now that it has a solid release date. The instant photo kit ships to stores on August 29th, when it will cost the same $299 that The Impossible Project promised during its crowdfunding campaign. Compatibility hasn’t changed much since then — you’ll need to use at least an iPhone 4 or fourth-generation iPod touch, and there’s no immediate support for devices using Android or other platforms. If that’s no barrier, however, you can bring your digital photos to the analog world in a matter of weeks.

Edward Snowden revealed himself this week as the whistleblower responsible for perhaps the most significant release of secret government documents in U.S. history. The former CIA staffer and analyst for the private intelligence consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton spoke to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman in Hong Kong, providing convincing evidence that the U.S. government, primarily the National Security Agency, is conducting massive, unconstitutional surveillance globally, and perhaps most controversially, on almost all, if not all, U.S. citizens.

The chorus of establishment condemnation was swift and unrelenting. Jeffrey Toobin, legal pundit, quickly blogged that Snowden is “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” New York Times columnists chimed in, with Thomas Friedman writing, “I don’t believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower.” His colleague David Brooks engaged in speculative psychoanalysis of Snowden, opining, “[t]hough obviously terrifically bright, he could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.”

Snowden’s educational path has attracted significant attention. U.S. senators oh-so-gently questioned NSA Director Gen. Keith B. Alexander and others at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, including liberal Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, echoing Brooks’ incredulity that someone with a GED could possibly hoodwink the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. Alexander confessed, “In the IT arena, in the cyber arena, some of these people have skills to operate networks. That was his job for the most part; he had great skills in the area. The rest of it you’ve hit on the head. We do need to go back and look at the processes–where we went wrong.”

Legendary whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg countered the criticism, writing, “In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an ‘executive coup’ against the U.S. Constitution.”

Snowden’s historic leak revealed what he calls an “architecture of oppression”—a series of top-secret surveillance programs that go far beyond what has been publicly known to date. The first was an order from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requesting a division of the phone giant Verizon to hand over “all call detail records” for calls to or from the U.S. and locations abroad, or all calls within the U.S., including local calls. Another document was a slide presentation revealing a program dubbed “PRISM,” which allegedly empowers NSA snoops access to all the private data stored by Internet giants like Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Google, Apple and Facebook, including email, video chats, photos, files transfers and more.

Snowden released Presidential Policy Directive 20—a top-secret memo from President Barack Obama directing U.S. intelligence agencies to draw up a list of targets for U.S. cyberattacks. Finally came proof of the program called “Boundless Informant,” which creates a global “heat map” detailing the source countries of the 97 billion intercepted electronic records collected by the NSA in the month of March 2013. Among the top targets were Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan. The leaked map color-codes countries: red for “hot,” then yellow and green. Last March, the U.S. was yellow, providing the NSA with close to 2.9 billion intercepts.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit immediately after the programs were revealed, arguing that the “practice is akin to snatching every American’s address book—with annotations detailing whom we spoke to, when we talked, for how long, and from where. It gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations.”

Edward Snowden, at the time of this writing, is in hiding, presumably still in Hong Kong, where he told the South China Morning Post, “I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality.” In the videotaped interview he gave to Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden spoke of his reasons behind the leak: “Sitting at my desk, [I] certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president. … This is something that’s not our place to decide. The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.”